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Anne, a murrine is made using almost the same techniques as a millefiori.. that is, layers of glass are built up to form a design, then pulled down to a very tiny cane. The image that started large remains intact, except much smaller. It's all glass.

If you look at our paperweights (and marbles) in our gallery pages, you will see designs similar to paperweights using mille- we tend to use concentric style in the layout.

Leni- No one in the States knows Django, I'm so happy to hear there is some recognition elsewhere for one of the greatest musicians of all time :-)

Frank, we get about 5 to 20 slices of murrine on average. We have only torches, so we can't pull down anything bigger than 2 inches without problems. To visualize the 'pull down'.. the picture I posted in this thread is a chunk of glass about 2.5" wide, 1.5" thick. It is made up of thousands and thousands of tiny colored glass strings I pulled to match the colors in the original image. Those are then fused, resulting in that block of glass. We later heated up the mass, and then stretched it very thin. That's the 'pull down' part (as Ray said in the earlier post).

Chris, good grief! I had no idea that it took so long - it looks incredibly fiddly. The idea of working with strands of glass and fusing them together to make such complex images is amazing. You must be extremely dextrous and have the patience of a saint to be able to do this work. Thank you very much for your explanation and for the link - I'll never look at a paperweight in quite the same way now.